Rep. Alan Grayson: Thank goodness for all of the “stealth socialism” going on around here

Erika JohnsenPosted at 5:31 pm on September 21, 2013

Most unfortunately, hyper-progressive Rep. Alan Grayson does seem to have identified a growing trend in America’s governing policies… but how he fails to grasp the negative correlation between the increase in said trends and the ongoing, barely-there stagnation of The Longest Recovery, Ever, is beyond me.

From a recent Salon interview, when asked whether the 2010 Dodd-Frank law has made the financial system safer or if nothing much has changed:

Yes, nothing has changed. The only thing that has changed is the passage of time. Sometimes time does not heal. We still have the problem of some institutions being too big to fail, and nothing has been done to make them smaller or less interconnected. …

The one good thing that’s happened in the past five years, in the sense of making people hopeful that the economy might survive a collapse, is that the Federal Reserve’s unconventional monetary policy put us back on a low-level track toward growth. They showed that monetary policy in extremis can work to some degree.

How big is the Fed balance sheet, $3 trillion?

$3.5 trillion. We’ve had a government takeover of the bond market. Stealth socialism’s been created. Government simply ends up owning more and more and more. If government had taken over the steel industry, maybe it would have been more noticeable. They’ve taken over the financing of housing industry as well, with a desired result. The result is now, finally, particularly in areas that were hard-hit, like mine in Central Florida, housing is ticking up again. So the Fed did in essence create an economic baseline that has led to something along the lines of 50,000-100,000 jobs created a month, setting a foundation for recovery for the U.S. economy.

“With a desired result,” say what? What is this “foundation for recovery” of which he speaks? Because, while I would also suggest that Dodd-Frank has accomplished approximately nothing except making it harder for smaller entities to compete by encumbering our economy with further regulation, I think Grayson would probably argue that the real problem is none of these regulations going far enough. The growing presence of big-government, top-down, central-planning policies coming down from the Obama administration is exactly what’s preventing robust recovery for the U.S. economy, and the perverse incentives the federal government created by getting too involved in financing of the housing industry was one of the main drivers of the recession in the first place.